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Brazil's Safety Net for the Poor: Dr. Ivo Pitanguy, the most celebrated plastic surgeon in the country, apparently earned enough money from well-off clients that he can now "give back," by funding and inspiring more than 200 clinics to provide low-income women with enhancement procedures (face lifts, tummy tucks, butt lifts) at a reduced, and sometimes no, charge. A local anthropology professor told ABC News, for a March dispatch, that "(i)n Brazil, plastic surgery is now seen as something of the norm" (or, as the reporter put it, "(B)eauty is (considered) a right, and the poor deserve to be ravishing, too"). [ABC News, 3-23-2012]

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In a March interview on Bolivian television, Judge Gualberto Cusi, who was recently elected to Bolivia's Constitutional Tribunal from the indigenous Aymara community, acknowledged that occasionally, when deciding tough cases, he relied on the Aymaran tradition of "reading" coca leaves. "In moments when decisions must be taken, we turn to coca to guide us and show us the way." [BBC News, 3-15-2012]

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In February, the Life-End Clinic in the Netherlands announced that six mobile euthanasia teams were placed in service countrywide to make assisted-suicide house calls -- provided the client qualified under the nation's strict laws. (Euthanasia, legal in the Netherlands since 2002, is available to people who suffer "unbearable, interminable" pain and for which at least two doctors certify there is "no cure." Panels of doctors, lawyers and ethicists rule on the applications.) [Agence France-Presse via Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 3-1-2012]